Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to presentation slide management and more particularly to template application to slide presentations in a computing system.
Description of the Related Art
Presentation software has formed the basis of corporate communications for well over a decade. Within the confines of the modern conference room, it has become nearly impossible to engage in oral discussion of a proposal without the use of a computer generated slide show. In this regard, the computerized presentation has become the mainstay of the oral presentation. Generally speaking, in a computerized presentation, a sequence of digital renderings of slides can be presented, either directly through a computer screen, or even through a projector or plasma presentation monitor. The individual slides, themselves, can include textual, audible and visual elements, including animated elements.
The prototypical presentation application includes a document processor, much like a word processor, in which the textual, visual and audible elements can be combined within a single slide show presentation. In this regard, each individual slide generally can follow a prescribed template, which can range from a free form workspace, to a highly structured arrangement of text, imagery and audio. In most cases, each slide will include a slide title and a slide body. While the slide title generally can include text only, the slide body can include free form text, bulleted or numbered lists, a picture, graph, chart, animation, audio and other such combinations.
While a presentation can be created based upon a prescribed template to include customized content such as text and background imagery, margins and border appearance, the template can vary at the direction of the presentation author while maintaining the content. In this regard, a tool can be provided in the presentation application to dynamically select and apply different templates to the same presentation in order to vary the visible appearance of the content. Exemplary changes resulting from a change in template can include different backgrounds, transitions between slides and fonts, to name only a few possibilities.
However, in doing so, oftentimes the appearance of the content can be altered in such a way as to defeat the presentability of the presentation. For instance, changing from one template to another, specific text in a presentation can suddenly become obscured through the inadvertent placement of a visual element over all or part of textual content in a presentation. As another example, a change in border size can result in unwanted text wrapping, or the off-screen movement of all or part of an image. At present, the presentation author must manually identify and correct formatting and content errors resulting from the application of a new template to an existing presentation.